SOURCE: Plumstead, A. W. “Satirical Parody in Roister Doister: A Reinterpretation.” Studies in Philology 60, no. 2 (April 1963): 141-54.

[In the following essay, Plumstead reads Ralph Roister Doister as a parody of medieval chivalric heroes.]

I

Professor Ewald Flugel has called Nicholas Udall “the father of English comedy,” and according to Allardyce Nicoll, Ralph Roister Doister is “the first complete English comedy designed for public performance in London.”¹ Critical discussions of the play, however, have been largely concerned with its date, its sources, and its adaptation of the characters and techniques of Plautus and Terence to the English stage.² Because of Udall's blending of Roman and “native” English elements, Roister Doister has now settled into a comfortable niche in surveys of Pre-Shakespearean drama as an important transitional step in the growth and structure of English Renaissance comedy which reached its peak in Shakespeare and Jonson.

There is a dimension of Roister Doister, however, which has been overlooked—one which lends more humor and meaning to the play, making it a better comedy in its own right, and one which adds further commentary on the times and the direction that English comedy was to take. References in the play to knights and chivalric conventions establish in the minds of an educated audience (as Udall's audience would surely have been)³ the ethics of courtly love: humility, courtesy, and “gentilesse,” which medieval romances such as Le Morte Darthur, Guy of Warwick, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde had absorbed from the courtly allegory tradition. The behavior of the three main characters, Merrygreek, Dame Custance, and especially Roister, viewed against this code of love ethics, becomes much funnier than when seen merely as the stock miles gloriosus, parasite, and mistress, of Roman comedy. Roister is more than a Roman knight; he tries to act like a medieval Lancelot or Troilus. Too exclusive a discussion of the play's Roman derivations has obscured its late medieval humor—the ironic incongruity of a conceited braggart trying to act like a chivalric lover. The play is a satirical parody of medieval chivalric heroes.

Moreover, in addition to its parody of chivalric romance in general, the play is perhaps a parody of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. There is evidence that Udall had read Chaucer, and internal evidence in the play suggests that he may have had Chaucer's story in mind when he wrote Roister Doister.⁴ If he did intend his audience to recall Chaucer's poem, however, it was only to serve as a general pattern or schemata of courtly love in a well-known romance, in contrast with which his own characters would appear ridiculous. Although there are several distinct echoes between the two, there is no continuous parallel, and a detailed knowledge of Chaucer's story is not necessary to appreciate Udall's parody. Even if Udall did not have Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde in mind, a comparison of the play with the poem will show the satire which is the dominant tone and theme of Udall's play. He has taken the love plots of Miles Gloriosus and The Eunuch, where they are quite subsidiary, and made them the main focus of his play. This enlargement seems to recall purposely the action of Chaucer's romance: a love-sick knight, a “friend” who will help win his lady, and the chivalric art of love.⁵ Udall's juxtaposition of braggart and knight in one motley character begins a long line of braggarts in love which will include Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Epicure Mammon. Let us consider this achievement in more detail.

II

Matthew Merrygreek's first description of Roister suggests a potential courtly lover rather than a braggart. Like Troilus, Roister is conquered by the lady's “smile” and “eye.” Although he wants each of his loves for a “wife,” he “is but dead and gone / Except she on him take some compassion” (117).⁶ To any in Udall's audience familiar with Chaucer, “compassion” in this context would suggest courtly love.⁷ At the outset, Udall has alluded to the intense humility of the courtly love tradition, and he will derive much subsequent humor from the discrepancy between the true despair of a lover like Troilus, and Roister's hypocritical moaning as he tries to act the part.

Merrygreek discovers Roister in one of his love throes, and by skillful flattery maneuvers Roister into taking him on as servant and counsel. In a passage which might have been suggested by Chaucer,⁸ Merrygreek pretends that some passers-by in the street had enquired about the dazzling Roister, asking if he were “Noble Hector of Troy” or “Great Goliath, Samson, or Colbrand,” among others (123). Udall begins this catalogue of heroes with two famous knights of chivalric romance, whose exploits in war and love would be known by many in his audience either from direct reading or legend.⁹ The audience, as well as Roister, is invited to make a direct comparison.

“Who is this?” saith one, “Sir Launcelot du Lake?”
“Who is this? Great Guy of Warwick?” saith another.

Roister is enthralled with Merrygreek's tremendous sweep of heroes, and congratulates him on making the correct—indeed, Roister probably thinks, the only possible—answer to these admirers: “Yes; for so I am,” he says—a modern Guy of Warwick, a new Lancelot du Lake.

The humorous discrepancies between the connotations of “Guy of Warwick,” “Launcelot du Lake,” and Roister are extended in Act I, scene iv. Merrygreek has arrived at the home of Roister's new love, Dame Custance, and describes Roister to Madge Mumblecrust, the Dame's nurse: “This is he, understand, / That killed the Blue Spider in Blanchepowder land” (137). Merrygreek knows enough about chivalric romance to feign the dramatic moment when the dragon is slain in a desolate, gothic setting, except that a blue spider is a long way (in the Lilliputian sense) from Guy of Warwick's Wild Boar, or Colbrond (or the Dun Cow).¹⁰ “Blanche-power” in Udall's day meant “a mixture of spices used as a condiment or dessert dressing.”¹¹ If Tudor “blanchepowder” was in fact a white powder or salt, Udall asks us here to picture a soft powder-land, perhaps like vapory clouds, or a Sahara desert of white sand. In any event, the image implies that Roister's feat could take place only in a land of make-believe; it suggests a mock epic; it is concentrated and graphic, yet suggestive and elusive. It allows Merrygreek again to satisfy Roister's vanity, while revealing out loud that he is a fool. It is a brief high point in the Tudor interlude, a hint of things to come—such as Sir Epicure Mammon's famous lines:

I will have all my beds, blowne up; not stuft:
Downe is too hard.(12)

Merrygreek proceeds to tell of Knight Roister's life-and-death battles with elephants,¹³ “Belzebub,” and of a conqueror's march “from Rome to Naples,” where Roister “won towns, nurse, as fast as thou canst make apples” (137). As in the earlier catalogue of medieval, Biblical, and ancient heroes, these allusions serve a double purpose; they sustain the chivalric backdrop against which Roister looks so ridiculous, and they further trap Roister into delusions of grandeur.

Having established in the first four scenes a pattern of expectancy in which the audience is alerted to Roister's pretense to chivalry, Udall proceeds to put him through some courtly paces. Like Troilus, Roister writes a letter pleading with his lady to look favorably on him, and later he sends a ring and “a token in a clout” (143) to the Dame via his servant, Dobinet. As Dobinet searches for the house, he attests to Roister's desire to follow the correct procedures.

With every woman is he in some love's pang.
Then up to our lute at midnight, twangledom twang;
Then twang with our sonnets, and twang with our dumps. …

(142)

The sonnets and songs suggest a courtly lover (although, true to Roister's sense of his own importance, he is in love with “every woman”).¹⁴ That Udall wished his audience to recall the ethics of courtly love is made clear when Dobinet again reminds the audience of Roister's mock despair:

Then, when answer is made that it may not be,
“O death, why comest thou not by-and-by?” saith he.

(143)

Such a sentiment is not found in either Plautus' Pyrgopolinices or Terence's Thraso, who have been proposed as the closest direct sources of Roister;¹⁵ it is a parody of a medieval knight's acute sense of humility in love.

This mock love-despair becomes one of the highlights of the play. Merrygreek reports to Roister that Dame Custance refuses his suit. Both audience and suitor realize that now is the time for despair and a reluctance to live, according to the convention. Merrygreek's consolation to Roister, like Pandarus' to Troilus after the decision to send Criseyde to the Greeks,¹⁶ is that “Ye shall have choice of a thousand as good as she,” (157) but Roister (although as a braggart he is chagrined to realize he has been turned down) plays his role and replies, “I will go home and die!” Here is comic irony unlike anything in Roman comedy; for the moment, a braggart condescends to a ritual he is determined to fulfill, even though such despair is the last thing a braggart would submit to, unless as a trick. Merrygreek, eager to test the integrity of what he knows is a false front (and here he acts as the audience's spokesman), calls Roister's bluff and asks, “Then shall I bid toll the bell?” In a sharp, startled reply that would draw a laugh from the audience, Roister says “No.” For a moment he is confused; as a braggart, he does not want to die merely because he has not been able to capture his prey, or have his desire; as a medieval knight, he should want to die because life without his lady's favor is not worth living.

Merrygreek pursues his joke, Roister decides to be courtly, and the two are soon playing priest and corpse in a mock funeral which could also have been suggested by Chaucer's scenes of Troilus languishing. Again humor emerges from the discrepancy between Roister's pretense and reality. It has been pointed out that this scene may be a satire of the Roman Catholic funeral service.¹⁷ This may be so, but, interpreted as such, it is an insertion in the play, a passage of local color in the religiously confused days of Edward VI and Mary. When interpreted in the courtly love tradition, however, this scene is more richly satirical and funny within a unified play. Roister pretends to die because he cannot win (or own) his lady (and her money). But he has none of the “desperaunce” of Troilus who thought, as Criseyde approached the “sick” room, “O Lord, right now renneth my sort / Fully to deye, or han anon comfort!” (420, ll. 1754-55). Roister's despair is a mockery compared to that of Troilus who went home, after the parliament's decision to trade Criseyde for Amintor, without further will to live:

“Ne nevere wol I seen it shyne or reyne,
But ende I wol, as Edippe, in derknesse
My sorwful lif, and dyen in distresse.”

(444, ll. 299-301)

…
And shortly, so his peynes hym torente,
And wex so mat, that joie nor penaunce
He feleth non, but lith forth in a traunce.

(444, ll. 341-43)

Roister's funeral is a mockery of true despair and humility—a symbolic expression of his falseness. His repetition of the simple, stock phrase “Heigh-ho!” during the funeral service (158, 159) suggests that he feels nothing more. The live body pretending to be dead is the same commentary on his false sense of love as is Falstaff's apparent corpse on the battlefield a monument to his dishonor—and could be played on the stage as effectively.

After Roister's recovery, Merrygreek urges a renewal of the suit. In courtly fashion, Roister urges Dame Custance to “accept” his “service” (164), and Merrygreek reminds her that Roister has been “kind” to her, although of necessity he foregoes being more specific.

The letter scenes follow, providing a second highlight in the play. Roister had earlier dictated a love letter to a scrivener, and then made a copy of it himself, which he sent to the Dame via Madge. Roister had mis-punctuated the letter however, so that it now reads like a deliberate affront rather than a testament of affection. The ironic clashes of the two letters are comical in themselves, but they are even more delightful when seen as part of the chivalric-fool, pretense-reality motif which pervades the play.

Troilus lists three main parts to his letter to Criseyde.

First … gan hire his righte lady calle,
His hertes lif, his lust, his sorwes leche,
His blisse, and ek thise other termes alle
That in swich cas thise loveres alle seche. …

(413, ll. 1065-68)

Second, “He gan hym recomaunde unto hire grace”; and finally, he pleads for her mercy in excusing and accepting the boldness of his suit. Roister's letter conforms to the first two requirements. Roister tells his lady that she has “beauty, demeanour and wit”; she is a woman of “virtue,” and a “fine paragon” (172). He then commends himself. He will keep her “right well” as a wife. She will find him never “unkind,” and, in a very courtly phrase, he reminds her that she will find in him “much gentleness.” This all comes out in a second reading of the original draft by the scrivener who defends his work and reveals Roister's fumbling.

The scene is richly comic because Roister unknowingly becomes a victim of his stupidity. He writes his lady that he is full of “gentleness,” and in the process reveals his lack of “gentleness.” For his copy ironically reveals the real Roister—arrogant, demanding, interested in money and possession rather than the lady and selfless love. And the angle of vision which exposes Roister here is not just irony per se, but the gentle and humble art of courtly love, which stands above the play, called into it by an allusion or phrase—laughing, mocking, throwing Roister's vanity into silhouette. The two-faced letter is a symbol of Roister's motleyness. The letter he sent is a fumbling copy of the original, just as Roister is a counterfeit of chivalry.

When the Dame still refuses him, Roister becomes frustrated and more vainglorious. He reminds the Dame that she is dealing with some of England's great knights, a new version of the national patron saint of chivalry. He tells his servants to see that his “harness … target, and … shield” are “made as bright now as when [he] was last in field,” and that “all shine as bright as Saint George” (176).¹⁸ But unlike St. George, Roister confuses the monster and the lady in a complete reversal of the courtly code; frustrated to desperation, he decides that if he cannot win his lady by love, he will conquer her by force, and he prepares his knights for battle.

Before the fray begins, Trusty, a friend of the Dame's betrothed, chastises Roister for his unknightly conduct:

Yet a noble courage, and the heart of a man,
Should more honour win by bearing with a woman.

(192)

The phrase “bearing with a woman” would recall to many in Udall's audience several ladies and their knight servants—among them Lancelot and Guinevere, Guy of Warwick and Phillis, Troilus and Criseyde. Roister replies to Trusty: “Nay, I will take the law on her withouten grace” (193). How different Roister's actions are from Pandarus' advice to Troilus:

“… for nought but good it is
To loven wel, and in a worthy place;
The oughte nat to clepe it hap, but grace.”

(399, ll. 894-96)

Or, how different are Roister's intentions from King Arthur's instructions on the responsibilities of knighthood: “… allwayes to do ladyes, damesels, and jantilwomen and wydowes socour: strengthe hem in hir ryghtes, and never to enforce them, uppon payne of dethe” (italics mine).¹⁹ Udall's use of “noble courage,”²⁰ “honour,” and “grace” in three lines brings into focus the ethics of courtly love; in attacking the Dame's house, Roister thinks he is a courageous knight, but his disregard of nobility, honor, and grace is painfully discourteous.

After several skirmishes between Roister's “knights” and the Dame's “knightesses,” her forces are victorious, and she announces in the idiom of a romance, “this field is ours.” As Roister retires, Merrygreek brings the satire full circle with a sarcastic reminder of Roister's earlier allusion to St. George. “What then? Saint George to borrow, our ladies' knight!” (196). To anyone familiar with England's patron saint of chivalry (whose story was available to Udall's audience in several romances and ballads), the incongruous comparison of cowardly Roister to one of the “two characters” who “stand out as par excellence the knights of holiness,” would be ridiculously funny.²¹

Northrop Frye's commentary on archetypal comedy, enlarging on Bergson's rigidity thesis in Laughter, is helpful here. Frye writes: “The principle of the humor [i. e., Ben Jonson's humor theory of comedy] is the principle that unincremental repetition, the literary imitation of ritual bondage, is funny.”²² Roister is an alazon, an imposter. From an archetypal viewpoint, his basic stupidity and vanity keep Roister in bondage; his inherent misunderstanding of chivalry keeps poking through the masks he tries to wear. In the funeral scene he submits his egotism to a mock purgation; in the letter, he tries to adopt the mask of a humble suitor; here, he reverts to the great chivalric fighter. But this last pretense is equally unstable, for Roister is also a fool at fighting. His victories will obtain only in Blanchepowder Land, and the audience delights in expectation of his losing the fight—which is what happens. In three key scenes—the funeral, the letter, and the battle, Udall has shown the disintegration of the chivalric masks of Roister Doister. And because nothing more serious than the deflation of Roister's ego is involved, the irony is high comedy.

The play ends on a happy note. Roister's foppery has been exposed, ridiculed, and forgiven. But he is far from humiliated. He attempts to regain his composure as well as his friends by putting on again the mask of a courteous knight—a masterful stroke on Udall's part. Dame Custance reminds Roister of his defeat by accusing him of being a “usurer” (204) who will not lend blows but he requires “fifteen” in return (which of course he received). Roister's reply looks forward to that great moment in the Elizabethan theatre when Falstaff replies to Hal's accusation with his “I was a coward on instinct” speech. Like Falstaff, Roister craftily slides by his adversary:

Ah, dame, by the ancient law of arms, a man
Hath no honour to [soil] his hands on a woman.

(205)

This is preposterous. I was a real knight all along, says Roister; I let you win out of courtesy; what honorable knight would dare strike a woman? (And yet, his vanity is still there; his use of “soil” suggests that he has considered himself a little superior to the whole mess all along). The audience laughs, the players shake hands, and the play closes with a tribute to the Queen.

III

Several conclusions may be drawn from this study. First, I suggest that Roister Doister is a more sophisticated play than has been recognized. Viewed as a parody of courtly love, the play takes on a dimension of satiric irony that looks forward to Jonson. According to Alan S. Downer, love in Roister Doister is “a perfunctory device to move the plot.”²³ But it is much more than this. Udall has made the art of love the focus of his play. The love theme and the plot—especially in the three key scenes of funeral, letter, and battle—are functions of one another: the plot reveals the ambiguity of Roister's love, and the incongruity of his braggartism and his pretense of chivalry create further plot. Roister Doister is not a great play—its verse and lack of compact dialogue become monotonous—but Udall's ability to sustain two angles of vision, playing one against the other, is a sophistication in technique that had only briefly appeared previously in English drama in the Second Shepherd's Play. Udall brought the silly knight, in the tradition of Chaucer's “Sir Thopas” and the “Nun's Priest's Tale,” and Brant's Narrenschiff, adopted by Barclay in 1509 as The Shyp of Folys (see especially “Von Grossem Ruemen, of Great Boasting”), onto the English stage, and thus helped shape the tradition of comical satire. (Cervantes' Don Quixote was not written until about fifty years after Udall's play).

Second, to the old debate on Roister Doister's sources, I would add Udall's reading in medieval romance. My argument for his using Troilus and Criseyde is not conclusive, but there are enough echoes to make the hypothesis tenable, and it appears that he read and admired Chaucer. The allusions to Warwick, Lancelot, and St. George suggest that Udall was familiar with several romances besides Chaucer's.

Finally, there is the question of “classical” and “native.” The standard view is that Udall “has evolved an entirely independent English comedy in classic style.”²⁴ There is no difficulty (although much debate) in seeing pertinent adaptations of Plautus and Terence. But the play's native characteristics, or “independent” elements are not as clear.

The native element I see in the play is its tone. English literature has no monopoly on satire, but its greatest writers have laughed at and scorned the follies of confidence men and sham pretenders: witness Chaucer on the Pardoner and Sir Thopas, Jonson on Mammon, Shakespeare on Malvolio, Dryden on Shadwell, Swift on Gulliver and Bickerstaff, Carlyle on Cagliostro. Perhaps Udall, like Jonson a few years later, saw a need to satirize the visions of knightly grandeur which many young boys and men of the day must have entertained, and which he was in a good position to appreciate as schoolmaster at Eton and Westminster, turning out young courtiers. In Udall's play, Roister does not satirize the code; the code satirizes him. Roister tries to adopt the code without wishing to understand its essential, inner spirit. His pretense to chivalry is like (to use the play's own analogy) a gnat's wish to be, and fight, an elephant; Roister has neither the physical nor ethical resources to be a great knight in the tradition of Guy of Warwick, Lancelot, or St. George. And he should know better than to try. Roister is a good example of “the common and baser sort” of fool, who, says Erasmus' Folly, is “wholly mine beyond controversy.”

How various the action of fools! … Here is a fellow dying for love of a sweet young thing, and the less he is loved in return, the more helplessly he is in love. This one marries a dowry, not a wife. … Here is a man in mourning, but mercy me, what fool things he says and does! Hiring mourners as if they were actors, to play a comedy of grief!²⁵

In Marston's Malcontent, written approximately fifty years after Udall's play, Passarello, the fool, speaks to Malvole of the degenerate knights of Genoa.

Faith, I utter small fragments as your knight courtes your Citty widow with something of his guilt; some advauncing his high colured beard and taking Tabacco. This is all the mirrour of their knightly complements.²⁶

As L. C. Knights has suggested, such passages in the later drama are part of the dramatists' satire of degenerate chivalry.²⁷ Passarello's remarks recall Roister. In my reading of the play, there is enough meaning implied by Udall's satiric tone to temper Miss Bradbrook's comment that he “aimed only at amusement.”²⁸ I am sure he did—but surely he did more. Udall's play is a gentle warning that playing at chivalry should be reserved for childhood—the Huck and Tom time of life. “Gentilesse” cannot be entered into lightly or falsely; it requires true men; and it is not a school of vanity. When Udall wrote in his “Prologue” that the Roman comedians “Under merry comedies secrets did declare, / Wherein was contained very virtuous lore” (115), perhaps he saw his own play as a mirthful interlude which would secretly declare “virtuous lore,” a laughing invitation to “yonge, fresshe folkes, he or she, / In which that love up groweth with youre age,” to look at the foibles of “worldly vanyte” (which, in a more serious and metaphysical vein, also closes Chaucer's great poem, 479, ll. 1835-36). The “native” element in Roister Doister, then, is the English acumen for a robust, satirical—and corrective—laughter, common to Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Swift, and Carlyle. By means of the purgation of comedy, Udall is in his own way a humanist.

Notes

1. Flugel, “Nicholas Udall,” Representative English Comedies, ed. Charles Mills Gayley (New York, 1912), p. 99, hereafter cited as Flugel; Nicoll, British Drama (London, 1925), p. 58.

2. The earliest suggested date (Flugel, pp. 95-96) is 1534, the latest, 1554. 1553-54 is now most widely accepted. Cf. F. S. Boas, Five Pre-Shakespearean Comedies (London, 1950), p. xiii, hereafter cited as Boas. The Roman sources debate is summarized by Wm. Chislett, Jr., “The Sources of Ralph Roister Doister,” MLN, XXIX (1914), 166. For Udall's adaptations, see Flugel and Boas.

3. Because we cannot be positive about the date of the play, it is difficult to proceed to the circumstances of its first presentation. Sir E. K. Chambers, in The Medieval Stage (London, 1903), II, 452, suggests that “the play may have been one of those given at court in the Christmas of 1553.” Boas says that “the boys in the Bishop's school at Southwark may have created the parts of Roister Doister and Matthew Merrygreek,” p. xiii.

4. A. R. Moon, “Two References to Chaucer Made by Nicholas Udall,” MLR, XXI (1926), 426-27. For points of comparison between Roister Doister and Troilus and Criseyde, see below, esp. n. 7, 8, 16, and 20.

5. Flugel suggests the comparison: Merrygreek is a “character belonging to the class of Pandarus, a ‘Friend’ playing the part of kindly Fate” (p. 100).

6. All references to Roister Doister are to Boas' edition of the play. The numbers refer to page numbers in this edition.

7. When Palamon in “The Knight's Tale” first sees Emelya in the garden, he thinks she may be Venus, and on his knees he asks her to “have som compassioun” on his “lynage,” if she cannot free him from prison (28, 1110). Troilus, similarly struck by Criseyde's beauty, goes home and concentrates on “argumentes to this conclusion, / That she of him wolde han compassioun,” (394, 466-67). Udall's line seems an echo of Chaucer's here.

8. Troilus and Criseyde, 401, ll. 1076-82. All quotations from Troilus and Criseyde are from F. N. Robinson's second edn., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Boston, 1957). The numbers refer to page and line numbers.

   And in the town his manere tho forth ay
   Soo goodly was, and gat hym so in grace,
   That ecch hym loved that loked on his face.
   For he bicom. …
   …
   … the beste knyght,
   That in his tyme was or myghte be.

   I agree with Clarence Griffin Child, who says in his edition of Roister Doister (Boston, 1912, hereafter cited as Child) that “the passage concerning the admiration of the ladies for Udall [sic Roister?] is plainly a reminiscence of [Miles Gloriosus, I, ll. 55-71]” (p. 158). Udall could also have recalled this passage in Chaucer, and parodied the esteem of those who “looked on his face.”

9. According to Louis B. Wright, many plain citizens in London sought escape from their “savorless and dull” everyday lives “in the copious literature of romance. An important part of the output of the early printing presses in England consisted of romances. … From the mid-sixteenth century onward, the old-fashioned tales of chivarly were gradually relegated to the more unsophisticated readers, and romances, which had begun as aristocratic works, appeared in cheap quartos. …” Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill, 1935), pp. 375-76. In “The Vogue of Guy of Warwick from the Close of the Middle Ages to the Romantic Revival,” PMLA, XXX (1915), 125-94, Ronald S. Crane examines in detail the editions and extensive popularity of the Guy story. There were at least two editions available to Udall's audience of 1540-55, “purely commercial ventures, intended to sell cheaply and to reach a general audience” (pp. 128-30). Lancelot's adventures were most readily available in Caxton's edition of Malory's Le Morte Darthur, first printed in 1485.

10. In view of Ronald S. Crane's thesis that Guy of Warwick was perhaps the most popular romance in Udall's time, it is tempting to suggest that Udall's Blue Spider parodies the Dun Cow in the Guy story, because of the parallel in phrasing, reference to color, and humorous discrepancy between their sizes. But, as Crane points out (p. 152), the Dun Cow adventure first appeared in a ballad licensed in 1592. Guy's adventure with the Cow was apparently “oral tradition” around Warwick for “at least a hundred years before the ballad was published,” but Udall's London audience would not have been familiar with it. Perhaps Udall had heard of the Dun Cow, and his Blue Spider is a private laugh, or, more likely, the Spider is simply a parody of all monsters in Chivalric romance.

11. Child, p. 160.

12. Ben Jonson, “The Alchemist,” Works, ed. Herford and Simpson (Oxford, 1954), V, 319.

13. Udall, editor and translator of Erasmus, would certainly have known his Moriae Encomium, and could have borrowed several suggestions for the plot and character of Roister Doister (Cf. n. 25 below). A distinct echo appears here. Merrygreek turns from his description of Roister's plucking of an elephant's tusk to his own plucking of a “fowl's feather” and “the foot of a gnat” from Roister's coat (138). Erasmus' Folly begins her self-eulogy with the rationalization that self-praise is at least better than the custom of hiring a flatterer who “adorns a crow with other birds' feathers … and, in sum, makes an elephant out of a gnat.” (Translated Hoyt Hudson, Princeton, 1941, p. 9). Earlier in Act I, Merrygreek had replied to an admirer's wondering if Roister were Hector with “No, but of the same nest … it is a bird.” Udall associates images of birds, feathers, grasshoppers, spiders, bees and gnats with Roister throughout Act I to accentuate his puniness.

14. Troilus, pondering “what to arten hire [Criseyde] to love …” (393, l. 388), wrote a song for which Chaucer made, according to Professor Robinson, “a fairly close rendering of Petrarch's Sonnet 88” (p. 815). Perhaps some in Udall's audience had read the manuscript love sonnets of Wyatt and Surrey, soon to be published in Tottel's Miscellany, 1557. If so, Dobinet's reference to Roister's midnight sonnet writing would be rich with suggestions of courtly love.

15. D. L. Maulsby, “The Relation between Udall's ‘Roister Doister’ and the Comedies of Plautus and Terence,” Englische Studien, XXXVIII (1907), 251-77. Cf. Wm. Chislett, op. cit. (n. 2).

16. Pandarus says,

    “This town is full of ladys al aboute;
    …
    If she be lost, we shal recovere an other.”

    (445, ll. 401-406)

17. Edwin Shepard Miller, “Roister Doister's Funeralls,” SP, XLIII (1946), 42-58.

18. Child points out (p. 164) that this passage is borrowed from Miles Gloriosus, I, i. The reference to St. George is, of course, Udall's addition. But surely this small addition removes the passage from a Roman context, and colors the whole with a background of medieval chivalry. The passage suggests that for the remainder of the play, Roister would be dressed like St. George—a visual, hilarious climax to his beliefs that he was a modern Lancelot, Guy of Warwick, and St. George.

19. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver (Oxford, 1954), p. 91.

20. Udall could have borrowed this phrase from Pandarus' speech where it occurs in conjunction with “grace.”

    “For certainly, the firste poynt is this
    Of noble corage and wel ordayné,
    A man to have pees with himself, ywis.
    So oughtest thou, for nought but good it is
    To loven wel, and in a worthy place;
    The oughte nat to clepe it hap, but grace.”

    (399, ll. 891-96)

21. The story of St. George was most readily available in Caxton's The Golden Legend (1487). See “The Legend of St. George,” The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore, 1932), I, 379-90.

22. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 168.

23. The British Drama: A Handbook and Brief Chronicle (New York, 1950), p. 57.

24. C. F. Tucker Brooke, The Tudor Drama (Boston, 1911), p. 160.

25. The Praise of Folly, translated Hoyt Hudson (Princeton, 1941), p. 68. A colleague, Professor J. McConica, finds that Roister Doister is clearly in the “Lucianic vein” of Erasmus, and suggests that Udall's use of St. George is “classic Erasmian.”

26. The Plays of John Marston, ed. H. Harvey Wood (London, 1934), I, 161.

27. Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London, 1937), pp. 256-69.

28. Muriel C. Bradbrook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (London, 1955), p. 30.